poor father, so like that, as I grew older, I seemed his very double, as my old nurse used to tell me. Perhaps that may have accounted for the quick glance, which seemed almost of fear, which my mother used to give me sometimes when I entered a room where she sat at her embroidery-work. My mother dearly loved fine embroideries and laces, and in thinking of her I can no more separate her from them than I can a flower from its scalloped setting of petals.

I used to slink away as soon as possible when my mother turned her startled blue eyes upon me in such wise, that she might regain her peace, and sometimes I used to send my brother John to her on some errand, if I could manage it, knowing that he could soon drive me from her mind. One learns early such little tricks with women; they are such tender things, and it stirs one's heart to impatience to see them troubled. However, I will not deny that I may have been at times disturbed with some bitterness and jealousy at the sight of my brother and my stepfather having that which I naturally craved, for the heart of a little lad is a hungry thing for love, and has pangs of nature which will not be stilled, though they are to be borne like all else of pain on earth. But after I saw Mary Cavendish all that passed, for I got, through loving so entirely, such knowledge of love in others that I saw that the excuse of love, for its weaknesses and its own crimes even, is such as to pass understanding. Looking at my mother caressing my brother instead of myself, I entered so fully into her own spirit of tenderness that I no longer rebelled nor wondered. The knowledge of the weakness of one's own heart goes far to set one at rights with all others.

When I first saw Mary Cavendish she was, as I said before, a little baby maid of two and I a loutish lad of fourteen, and I was going through the park of Cavendish Hall, which lay next ours, one morning in May, when all the hedges were white and pink, and the blue was full of wings and songs. Cavendish Hall had been vacant, save for a caretaker, that many a day. Francis Cavendish, the owner, had been for years in India, but he had lately died, and now the younger brother, Geoffry, Mary's father, had come home from America to take possession of the estate, and he brought with him his daughter Catherine by a former marriage, a maid a year older than I; his second wife, a delicate lady scarce more than a girl, and his little daughter Mary.

And they had left to come thither two fine estates in Virginia—namely these two: Laurel Creek, which was Mary's mother's in her own right, and Drake Hill; and the second wife had come with some misgiving and attended by a whole troop of black slaves, which made all our country fall agog at once with awe and ridicule and admiration. I was myself full of interest in this unwonted folk, and prone to linger about the park for a sight, and maybe a chance word with them, having ever from a child had a desire to look farther into that which has been hitherto unknown, whether it be in books or in the world at large. My lessons had been learned that morning, as was easily done, for I was accounted quick in learning, though no more so than others, did they put themselves to it with the same wish to have it over. My tutor also was not one to linger unduly at the task of teaching, since he was given to rambling about by himself with a book under one arm and a fish-pole over shoulder; a scholar of gentle, melancholy moving through the world, with such frequent pauses of abstraction that I used often to wonder if he rightfully knew himself whither he was bound.

But my mother was fond of him and so was my brother John, and as for my stepfather, Col. John Chelmsford, he had too weighty matters upon his mind, matters which pertained to Church and State and life and death, to think much about tutors. I myself was not averse to Master Snowdon, though he was to my mind, which was ever fain to seize knowledge as a man and a soldier should, by the forelock instead of dallying, too mild and deprecatory, thereby, perhaps, letting the best of her elude him. Still Master Snowdon was accounted, and was, a learned man, though scarcely knowing what he knew and easily shaken by any bout of even my boyish argument, until, I think, he was in some terror of me, and like one set free when he had heard my last page construed, and was off with his fish-pole and his book to the green side of some quiet pool. So I, with my book-lesson done, but my mind still athirst for more knowledge, and, maybe, curious, for all thirst is not for the noblest ends, crawled through a gap in the snowy May hedge, and was slinking across the park of Cavendish Hall with long, loose-jointed lopes like a stray puppy, and maybe with some sense of being where I should not, though I could not have rightly told why, since there were no warnings up against trespassers, and I had no designs upon any hare nor deer.

Be that as it may, I was going along in such fashion through the greenness of the park, so deep with rich lights and shadows on it that May morning that it seemed like plunging thought-high in a green sea, when suddenly I stopped and my heart leapt, for there sat in the grass before me, clutching some of it with a tiny hand like a pink pearl, the sweetest little maid that ever this world held. All in white she was, and of a stuff so thin that her baby curves of innocence showed through it, and the little smock slipped low down over her rosy shoulders, and her little toes curled pink in the green of the grass, for she had no shoes on, having run away, before she was dressed, by some oversight of her black nurse, and down from her head, over all her tiny body, hiding all save the merest glimmer of the loveliness of her face, fell the most wonderful shower of gold locks that ever a baby of only two years old possessed. She sat there with the sunlight glancing on her through a rift in the trees, all in a web of gold, floating and flying on the May wind, and for a minute, I, being well instructed in such lore, thought she was no mortal child, but something more, as she was indeed, but in another sense.

I stood there, and looked and looked, and she still pulled up tiny handfuls of the green grass, and never turned nor knew me near, when suddenly there burst with a speed like a storm, and a storm indeed it was of brute life, with loud stamps of a very fury of sound which shook the earth as with a mighty tread of thunder, out of a thicker part of the wood, a great black stallion on a morning gallop with all the freedom of the spring and youth firing his blood, and one step more and his iron hoofs would have crushed the child. But I was first. I flung myself upon her and threw her like a feather to one side, and that was the last I knew for a while. When I knew myself again there was a mighty pain in my shoulder, which seemed to be the centre of my whole existence by reason of it, and there was the feel of baby kisses on my lips. The courage of her blood was in that tiny maid. She had no thought of flight nor tears, though she knew not but that black thunderbolt would return, and she knew not what my ghastly silence meant. She had crept close to me, though she might well have been bruised, such a tender thing she was, by the rough fling I had given her, and was trying to kiss me awake as she did her father. And I, rude boy, all unversed in grace and tenderness, and hitherto all unsought of love, felt her soft lips on mine, and, looking, saw that baby face all clouded about with gold, and I loved her forever.

I knew not how to talk to a little petted treasure of life like that, and I dared not speak, but I looked at her, and she seemed not to be afraid, but laughed with a merriment of triumph at seeing me awake, and something she said in the sweetest tongue of the world, which I yet made poor shift to understand, for her baby speech, besides its incompleteness, had also a long-drawn sweetness like the slow trickle of honey, which she had caught